CEO Message

Are CRM PlatformsReal Estate Express® (REE)®: Integration with N-Process™: The Process Builder

REE® Work Flow

Why Microsoft CRM?

CRM and Content Management

The Value of Vertical solutions

Asset’s “Prefab” Vertical CRM Solutions

Palm Hills Develop-ments testimonials

Gartner Research: Are CRM Platforms Best for End-to-End Customer Business Processes?

Issue 2

Featuring research from

Real Estate Express THERE’S MORE IN CRM TO DISCOVER

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CEO Message: How Loyal Are Your Customers?

In today’s challenging economy and competitive business world, it takes a lot to satisfy your customer and much more to retain him and make him loyal.

Loyalty is critical for success. Give your customers good reasons to stay, or your competitors will give them good reasons to leave. Customer retention and loyalty drive profits. It’s far less expensive to cultivate your existing customer base and sell more services to them than it is to seek new customers. Most surveys across industries show that keeping one existing customer is five to seven times more profitable than attracting one new customer.

The Real Estate sector is one of these industries that have been affected by the economy downturn and the price cuts associated. Moreover, in today’s competitive Real Estate market, you can’t afford to let sales opportunities slip through the cracks. And you can’t afford the loss of a loyal customer.

Using the right CRM strategy and program will facilitate your employees to provide an outstanding customer experience, exceed their customers’ expectations and always keep your customers in the spotlight.

CRM is not just a software package; CRM is a board level vision and strategy. CRM is a concept which includes a variety of core technologies.

Each industry has its unique and complex needs. Pre-Packaged, Line of business (LOB) applications let you skip the lengthy development process. But because most commercial platforms are by nature one-size-fits-all solutions, they almost never fit the way your company does business.

What you need is a powerful, flexible and extensible CRM solution upon which is a fully integrated specialized Line of business (LOB) application.

Loyalty will then drive customers back to you again even if you don’t have the best product or service.

That would definitely keep him loyal.

Essam El BadryCEOAsset Technology Group

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Figure 1: Property & Unit Management

Real Estate Express® (REE)®:

Real Estate Express® (REE)® is a comprehensive solution for Sales & Customer Relationship Management, built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It combines a set of powerful tools specifically tailored for the Real Estate business to optimize performance and increase customer satisfaction. At the same time, its flexibility and extensibility make it the right choice for organizations that seek productivity and empowerment.

Sales Management Module:Sales module is the heart of the Real Estate Solution; it provides insight into the sales pipeline, including the ability to track types of opportunities, close ratios, revenue forecasts and other important sales information. This data is available at an individual and departmental level so that performance can be measured throughout the organization.

Property & unit Management:

The Real Estate sector is a variable market, since land and construction prices are not fixed. This creates a challenge to track the changes that follow market fluctuations. Adding to that is the nature of the frequently changing customer demands and requirements that create another challenge to track all the customer modifications and their effect over prices and delivery time.

Therefore, it is important to manage property and units and help sales people track the history, information and activities of the business property that is managed. Moreover, REE® manages all of the details of your Real Estate property data like companies, regions, stages, categories, banks and branches, which brings all vital information directly to your repository at your fingertips.

Customer & Account Management:

REE® helps you manage and track complex relationships, using customizable workflow rules and selling methodologies to help ensure that opportunities are tracked and closed consistently and efficiently. Moreover, REE® is an efficient customer satisfaction monitoring tool that keeps you up-to-date with customers through availing quick response to their requirements, complaints and providing latest information of property and unit prices. In addition, it is essential to provide your employees with an effective customer management system that responds to their customers’ needs and keeps records of your customers’ history and activities to employ in your sales cycle.

Source: Asset Gulf

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reservation Management:

The Sales Process is one of the vital ingredients in any successful business, and monitoring it to ensure that it is on-track is one of the elements of success. Moreover, one of the Sales Process components is the Reservation aspect. REE® offers a comprehensive automated reservation cycle solution that tracks and monitors unit reservation, payment details, and reservation cancellation.

Contract Management:

Generally contracts are confidential documents for customers and for vendors too, especially in the Real Estate sector, this is because all important information needs to be captured for legal references. REE® assists Contract specialists in having a complete view of their customer’s history like reservation payments, remaining values, ways of payments, installments and attaches any required contract amendments, contract cancellation. And this helps in monitoring the contracting process until final transaction takes place and the deal is closed. Furthermore, one of the benefits of the solution is the powerful auditing and tracking for customers’ history and activities, which also includes history of units’ price lists, transaction history for reservation and contract stage for every customer.

Contract details vary from project to another and from unit to another inside the same enterprise. REE® fetches the appropriate contract template and fills the contract details based on customer information and project/unit details.

Payment and installments management:

REE® helps in handling contract payments, discounts, payment types, and maintenance data. In addition, the system tracks installment payments details like amount, check number, bank, and date and allows for full flexibility for modifying any individual installment details as needed.

REE® also allows the rescheduling of an installment.

Marketing Management Module:Plan marketing campaign strategy based on budgets and expenses, promotion codes, target products, marketing collateral and more. Create and manage lists for specific campaigns or for future use by any campaign. Create lists using existing customer information or importing contact information from various sources into a

Figure 2: Reservation Management

Source: Asset Gulf

And now communication with customers is made easy with the new REE® SMS Feature

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Figure 3: Contract Management

Source: Asset Gulf

Figure 4: Payment and Installments management

Source: Asset Gulf

single repository. View campaign performance reports; assess campaign success based on opportunities, cost versus payoff, and other criteria; and analyze marketing results.

Service scheduling and Management Module:Manage service appointments and resource allocation across your service sites and locations with a single calendar view of service professionals, tools, resources and facilities.

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Figure 5: Unit & Pool Construction Status tracking

Source: Asset Gulf

mechanism. In addition, REE® offers automated generation of correspondence with the customer, like letters or faxes during different phases of the process.

executive reports:

Executive reports are the full spectrum of sales reports for analysis like unit availability, prices and areas, reservation and contracts reports, cancellation reports and many more. These reports are important to maintain and use for filtering of data elements like stage, category, unit, date range, seller, etc… before running the reports to get the right and specific information. Also, REE® offers highly secured access rights based on roles to protect sensitive information.

Advanced Search

One of the great features in the Real Estate solution is the ability to search and find CRM data based on complex filter criteria. In particular, the Advanced Find feature lets users create their own queries and then save those queries for later re-use.

Contact Center Support:

All employees are now able to have critical customer information at their fingertips and be able to assist customers through the proper communication channels and achieve a true 360 degree view of the customer and visibility across the entire organization for all roles.

unit & Pool Construction Status tracking:

One of the key benefits of REE® is the ability to track unit construction status day by day, view photos of each unit and update the photos as the unit construction progress and send unit status to customers by email; or send notification when certain progress is achieved. This is very helpful to monitor if the construction process is on course or delayed, and at the same time maintain mutual communication with the customer of his unit’s progress in the construction cycle.

Customer requests Management:

Customer requests are changeable throughout the sales process in the Real Estate business, therefore, it is noteworthy to manage these requests through a system that tracks these requests progress and detects any latency associated with the escalations and reminders

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Figure 6: Marketing dashboard

Source: Asset Gulf

Figure 7: Status Report Pie Chart

Source: Asset Gulf

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Figure 8: Sales Report

Source: Asset Gulf

Workflow and Business Process Automation

Each organization has its own specific and unique needs. In a customer-centric organization, it’s even better to build your business automation workflows on top of a CRM platform, not any other corporate software platform. This new trend definitely urges the customers to revisit the way they should evaluate a CRM implementation arm. It is no longer enough for CRM software consultants to “know the system”. They should now be experts in Business Process Automation too!

Source: Asset Gulf

Asset Technology® has a long track record of implementing integrated systems such as Business Intelligence solutions, internet Portals and enterprise integration modules. Additionally, Asset Technology’s own workflow platform, N-Process™, provides an excellent web-based tool for building customizable business process automation solutions. Therefore, while implementing a complex CRM system, Asset Technology® chooses to use all those features and capabilities to enrich the solution offering.

ree(r): Boost Your Business Performance to the Peak

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Integration with N-Process™: The Process Builder

N-Process; a web-based, fully graphical workflow builder (that uses Microsoft Work Flow foundation) is now tightly integrated with MS CRM Dynamics.

N-Process allows users to build and modify complex business processes without adding a single line of code, and possibly without any prior programming knowledge either. The tool is web-based, so everything is centrally stored and controlled on the server. It uses a very familiar drag-and-drop design paradigm, thus significantly shortening the learning curve.

With a library of pre-built common steps, users can jump-start in building their own processes in no time. Building forms requires no additional training since N-Process uses the good Microsoft Office old InfoPath form builder.

Although seldom needed, the builder provides a “source code tab” which allows advanced users to add very specific actions and custom code components. And most importantly, N-Process provides the capability to build and export full workflows.

N-Process also includes comprehensive reporting and auditing modules, in addition to the ability to create custom reports.

Some of the notable features of N-Process™ include:

• Design Forms with InfoPath and import into N-Process

• Drag and drop interface

• Ready-made templates for most commonly used workflow steps

• Ability to set properties for each workflow step

• Assigning a user to each step (integrated with Active Directory)

• Custom Variables (multiple fields grouped into one field)

• Support for Arrays

• Send-Email Activity

• Event-Based automatic workflow Firing

• Scan & Attach document during the processing of a WF

All in all, it was found that in practical situations, using N-Process can save up to 70% of the time and TCO of the BPM system, due to its advanced features which cater for easy form creation and integration, graphical workflow building and the ability to perform most tasks without the need for developers.

Source: Asset Gulf

Figure 9: WF Builder

Source: Asset Gulf

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REE® Work Flow

Using Asset Technology’s monster N-Process builder, REE® Solution can automate internal business processes by creating workflows to carry out routine tasks that involve daily business operations. These processes can be designed to ensure that the right information gets to the right people at the right time, and help participants keep track of the steps they have to take to complete their work. Your managers can define, automate and enforce specific business rules, policies and procedures.

Workflow in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is now based on Windows Workflow Foundation, the same workflow engine used by Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint. Workflow is also accessed directly from within the CRM client, and rules can be addressed across applications.

Authorized users or administrators can create their own Workflow by using the Workflow wizard without any development efforts, assigning appropriate security roles; publishing rules to the community or to specific individuals or teams.

Microsoft Dynamics CrM and SharePoint

Integrating your CRM implementation with the company’s internal and external portals adds endless benefits to the overall solution. Managers will be able to view and analyze dashboards with a click of a button. Moreover, external access to your CRM features will be available to your customers online through social computing technologies.

Integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and the Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2007 will provide the user with a comprehensive CRM tool and several added powerful features such as the Document Management capabilities that the CRM lacks where users can view, open and connect to the Microsoft CRM live records and documents from inside the SharePoint Portal.

Source: Asset Gulf

Figure 10: REE Architecture

Source: Asset Gulf

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Why Microsoft CRM?

After much experience with many other CRM platforms, Asset® Technology Group took the decision to build its own vertical solutions on top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. The reasons behind this strategic shift can be summarized in several points:

• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Microsoft solutions always provide a rich set of widely-used development tools and languages, which facilitates the customization and integration process, and lowers the cost of professional services.

• Comprehensive Platform: Microsoft’s platform provides a comprehensive set of features that are adequate to cover almost any business scenario.

• Visual interface: The already-familiar interface and the unified visual terminology make it easier for both implementers and users to master the tool in no time. Anyone who can use Microsoft Outlook can use Dynamics CRM.

• integration: Microsoft CRM platform seamlessly integrates with a complete suite of other powerful Microsoft servers and tools that are essential for any successful CRM implementation. Examples include SharePoint and Microsoft BI Analysis/reporting tools.

• Outlook interface: “Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Microsoft Office Outlook” enables access to the same data as the Microsoft CRM 4.0 but through the Microsoft Office Outlook. This smart convergence uses the familiarity of Office Outlook to relieve the user from any inconvenience. In addition, the user can access the data offline. This helps users who require offline support while travelling or working without worrying about the synchronization process which is handled by the system.

• Business intelligence features: Microsoft is offering new business intelligence (BI) features for its Dynamics CRM. It leverages Microsoft’s existing (BI) tools in SQL Server and its Office functionality for use in the CRM application. With this tool set, you can always use the predictive analytical features to predict how likely a sales lead would close. It also offers new cross-sell and up-sell potential, analyzing the potential for a buyer to purchase other goods as well, based on its past purchase history. The (BI) made the reporting easier and better visualization of data.

Source: Asset Gulf

CRM and Content Management

Content is a pivotal element in many CRM systems. Content Management is a central pillar and main competency for Asset Technology®. Asset® has built an integration layer between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and its own suite of products, such as the Jupiter ECM™, Jupiter Document Management™ and N-Process™ workflow builder, which exceeds the value of any other solution offered in the market.

Therefore, if you are thinking about integrating CRM implementations with Content Management solutions in the enterprise, Asset Technology® will definitely be a top choice for you.

Source: Asset Gulf

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The Value of Vertical Solutions

The new wave of CRM implementation specialists comprises an important part of the CRM evolution in 2010. Throughout the past few years, focus was on the technology and platform features, and consequently on the implementer’s capabilities and expertise with regard to the specific platform in question. Today, customers are getting more mature and are evaluating an implementation firm based on how well they understand the customer’s own vertical. This vertical specific knowledge can be the thin line that separates successful implementations from disastrous ones.

Source: Asset Gulf

The major competency Asset® is known for is its strong vertical focus. With strong presence in the most challenging verticals in the local and regional markets, Asset® has proven to be a reliable vision partner to over 200 organizations spanning multiple verticals such as Telco, government, banking, financial, commercial, industrial and oil. Each of these sectors is internally represented within the company by a committee spanning the business and delivery forces. Thus, the company maintains strong focus on each sector, and manages to build specific vertical experience, which in turn reflects on the value the company presents to its new customers within those verticals.

Asset’s “Prefab” Vertical CRM Solutions

The company’s vision is to build ready CRM offerings that are tailored for specific industry verticals. The combination of technologies Asset® uses, and its long history of experience in variant vertical industries, allows it to build such ready-made “prefab” CRM solutions that the customers can further modify on their own. This approach provides the customer with a multitude of benefits. Here are a few examples:

• Customers will leverage the industry vertical’s best practices and industry-specific needs that are already built into the vertical solution

• Using prefabs will significantly shorten the development and implementation lifecycle, and therefore maximize ROI by minimizing implementation and customization times and efforts

• It will help the customer build their own custom solution by providing a “model implementation” that speaks the same industry language as the customer

In addition to those benefits, such prebuilt vertical solutions are provided to the customer along with adequate tools and training to modify their solution on their own, without having to go back to the implementation firm or hiring an outside consultant. This is achieved through the concept of “composites” and visual process builders, where users can modify their own business processes without having to write code or carry out software development tasks.

Source: Asset Gulf

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Palm Hills Developments testimonials

Palm Hills Developments (PHD) is a leading real estate company in the Egyptian market, primarily developing high-end, integrated residential real estate and resort projects.

Presently PHD posses one of the largest land banks in the country and is rapidly growing into a regional player.

“Our evaluation to any solution provider is based on two important factors: deep knowledge of the product offered and profound understanding of the industry that this solution serves.

We chose Asset Technology for its ability to fulfill both aspects. Asset Team has been able to provide us with the best-of-both worlds, the extensive knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics CRM technology and broad experience in the Real Estate Business processes and flow, which has added huge value to our business scheme.

I would have no hesitation in recommending the solution combination of REE® and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to other industry users.”

Hisham Salah VP Technology Palm Hills Development

“Defining an appropriate language for the marketing and sales communications was a key towards attaining my overall business vision which is “the customer bliss”.

Customer satisfaction is not enough. We need to exceed their expectations and give them more than they anticipate.

With Asset Technology’s developed solution “REE®” & “Microsoft Dynamics CRM” not only was I able to view a full spectrum of my business through extensive reports and analysis, but also helped in keeping in touch regularly with our customers, making a personal contact with them and focusing on how to always act in their best interest.

This achieved the exact kind of successful long term relationship we strive for when working with any of our customers.”

Yaseen Mansour President Palm Hills Development

Please visit www.assettechnology.com to find out more

about our products and services.

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research from gartner

Are CRM Platforms Best for End-to-End Customer Business Processes?

ANALYSiS

An ERP suite is usually considered the main technology platform for planning the use of back-office enterprise resources to meet customer demand, and to report financial results to various constituents. Additionally, ERP platforms are viewed as supporting products, employees, orders or financial-centric functions across the enterprise.

In contrast, CRM applications have been designed to focus on customer-centric needs spanning the enterprise, and they have better front-end acceptance. The major ERP vendors have evolved from an ERP customer base to offering CRM and business intelligence functionality as part of their suites (for example, Oracle and SAP). The result is that users need to reconsider where to design their customer-focused business processes. In turn, application leaders must determine when enterprises should use an ERP system as the platform for designing their end-to-end customer interactions versus using a CRM system, which could be an independent CRM system, a system from a best-of-breed CRM provider or a CRM system from their ERP vendor.

In this research, we identify the pros and cons of using a CRM or ERP platform for managing end-to-end customer business processes. Then, we present an approach that enterprises can use for determining the suitability of a CRM or an ERP platform for their end-to-end customer processes.

At first glance, many enterprises rule out the viability of ERP suites as a place where end-to-end customer business processes can be designed. This is because some enterprises contend that only CRM platforms can support customer processes. With most service-centric processes, many of the process points are supported from within the CRM suite. This makes CRM a likely contender as the starting point for designing end-to-end customer business processes, and for integrating processes to other components and platforms, as needed. However, ERP systems offer relevant and viable capabilities.

There is a growing need within enterprises to determine which system platform to choose for their end-to-end CrM processes. An inappropriately chosen platform for end-to-end customer business processes will require extensive and costly customizations.

Key Findings

• End-to-end customer business processes may vary by industry. In service-centric industries, CRM, not ERP, is best-suited for the end-to-end customer business process of onboarding. For product-centric business processes, ERP is sometimes the better fit.

• The focus of the process in an ERP system is the financial, employee or product record, while the focus of the process in a CRM system is the customer record.

recommendations

• Map end-to-end customer business processes exhaustively before considering any technology to help you support the design or management of these processes.

• Take a holistic look at the capabilities that a business process management system (BPMS) offers for supporting customer end-to-end business processes, before using a BPMS for process mapping.

• Consider CRM platforms for supporting the design of end-to-end business processes that are focused on the customer or a service.

• Leverage your ERP platform for supporting the design of your end-to-end business processes centered on product and product life cycle management.

• Use a custom business process management (BPM)-enabled solution (for example, as part of a business process platform) for supporting your end-to-end business processes, if you want to separate from a CRM or ERP platform vendor.

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Often, enterprises assume that because a core ERP platform covers these multiple functional domains (financial, manufacturing, projects, supply chain management and HR) within a business that it is the most likely setting to design broader customer end-to-end business processes focused on customer service and support. For this reason, we look further at the pros and cons of using ERP or CRM platforms as the foundation for managing end-to-end customer business processes.

1.0 Pros and Cons of erP as the Platform for end-to-end Customer Business Processes Gartner has observed that with some enterprises using ERP systems, there is a strong preference to remain centralized on a core ERP for end-to-end business processes, including for CRM functions. This is, in some cases, related to the nature of the business.

For some enterprises, competitive differentiation is primarily focused on products and price. Service differentiation is often a secondary focus, such as in the manufacturing industry. For example, in discrete manufacturing organizations, where most of the customer interactions are with product design engineers or salespersons, there are limited channels for customer interactions. In many such cases, the business is product-centric in that all processes are focused on manufactured goods, or the order process for those goods. Here, the most important

customer processes are linked to the processes of the business, and these processes are dominant in this product-centric scenario, and are closely coupled with customer interactions. This is distinct from service-centric scenarios — for example, in a banking environment, where customer interactions occur over many channels, and are decoupled from core banking processes of the business.

ERP also delivers cost advantages (and process integrity) to an enterprise over a fragmented business portfolio. ERP platforms help to synchronize information across end-to-end processes, and decrease the costs of ensuring process integrity. For these reasons, enterprises often want to use the ERP platform for their new functional requirements to ensure reconciliation across all data sets and ERP modules.

At the same time, because an overly customized ERP suite can be more expensive to upgrade (as not all customizations may be ported over by migration or upgrade utilities), enterprises sometimes prefer to keep customizations at a minimum and leverage ERP for their core functional coverage areas (financials, inventory, etc), rather than necessarily customize it for more specialized customer process support.

In Table 1, we explore the pros and cons of using ERP as the platform for end-to-end customer business processes (see Note 1).

Table 1. Pros and Cons of Using ERP Platforms

Cons

Depth and breadth of CRM functionality of a best-of-breed or dedicated CRM suite provides more capabilities.

Reporting and analytics could be more complicated, as ERP and its extensions are assumed to be transaction-oriented, with a data model designed for transactional support, not for customer-focused processes.

The high degree of integration in the ERP suite (focused primarily on financial records and products, not the customer record) may not provide the specific functionality needed for supporting CRM processes. Achieving such customized views could be quite costly.

Requires more-expensive and extensive customizations to support customer processes across multiple instances of the ERP suite.

Pros

Higher degree of interoperability with existing ERP modules, and the potential of greater out-of-the-box integration.

Enables enterprises to coordinate with non-CRM functions, and provides this analysis in a different light.

For product-centric scenarios, strong coupling of customer interactions, with core business processes supported by ERP, leading to customer process management more aligned with core business processes.

Strong focus on product-based, end-to-end business processes.

Source: Gartner (March 2009)

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2.0 Pros and Cons of CrM as the Platform for end-to-end Customer Business ProcessesGartner has observed that many enterprises that select CRM platforms for their end-to-end customer business processes tend to be more focused on providing differentiated services for enriching customer experiences. They do not necessarily have a product-based or manufacturing-centric approach (focused on operations efficiency) to their processes, which ERP is more capable of providing.

In other cases, enterprises with core ERP platforms opt for an independent CRM platform, best-of-breed provider, or a CRM platform from their ERP

vendors to support their customer service and sales support needs. In some cases, this is because users want more depth and functionality to support their customer processes, which their ERP vendors do not deliver. In scenarios involving a multiple-instance ERP, often one of the challenges for organizations is how best to create a common, global customer, end-to-end business process. Here, the option of a CRM platform is also attractive as a way to avoid upgrades or consolidation of instances within the ERP platform to support customer processes globally. Under such scenarios, enterprises could consider extending every instance of their ERP suites to support CRM functions, but they would need heavy customizations to accomplish this.

Table 2. Pros and Cons of Using CRM Platforms

Cons

Lack of strong links to financial records or product records.

Requires further integration with other components of the ERP suite for certain processes (for example, HR, financials, supply chain management processes for physical good shipments).

Does not offer strong focus for product-based end-to-end business processes. Process integrity across the enterprise process is more limited, with functionality largely focused only on the customer-specific view, not on broader financial processes or transactions.

Pros

More depth and functionality across sales, marketing service in direct support of customer end-to-end business processes than ERP. Greater ability to support customer value analyses. In scenarios involving multiple ERP instances requiring a common, global end-to-end customer process, an ability to support this need with lower costs.

Does not require an ERP suite to be overly customized to support customer-centric, end-to-end business processes.

Strong focus on customer end-to-end business processes, to the extent of the CRM platform.

Source: Gartner (March 2009)

Note 1

exception to erP Adoption

Often, with this ERP approach, it becomes challenging for the enterprise to focus on customer experiences and interactions removed from a product-centric or order-centric perspective. Similarly, the CRM functionality provided within the ERP suite may not offer the depth and breadth of functionality required by the enterprise to engage in an effective CRM strategy. At times, reporting and analytics can be more complicated under this approach, as well as ERP. Its extensions are assumed to be transaction-oriented. As such, the data model is designed for transactional support, not for customer-focused processes. Although a CRM data model may also need to address a similar challenge (deeper versus more broad business intelligence capabilities), it is not necessarily focused on financial records as ERP is. Instead, it is designed with customer-centricity in mind. For more-complex or more-sophisticated reporting needs, users of ERP or CRM platforms need to consider a more comprehensive business intelligence strategy.

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In Table 2, we explore some pros and cons for selecting a CRM platform for end-to-end customer business processes.

3.0 How Does BPM Affect the Selection Between CrM and erP Suites?An option outside the ERP and CRM platforms also exists. This involves a custom application developed in a BPM environment where an enterprise does not necessarily want to be indebted to a specific ERP or CRM vendor, and where enterprises feel they know their business processes best, and are not looking to introduce new data models. Rather, they are looking to leverage service-oriented architecture to design a business process and, where needed, extract information from ERP, CRM and other systems needed to support transactional processes for the business.

A BPM solution has many prolific uses:

• A BPM solution can be considered a development environment for business processes spanning the enterprise. (It is considered a build option where anything is theoretically possible from a build scenario.) A BPM solution is unlike the buy options that ERP and CRM platforms represent.

• BPM can also be an environment used to create a composite application that would be a different view of a process that spans multiple technology architectures, of which CRM or ERP and other major suites could be integral parts.

• On a simpler level, BPM can be just a model used for documenting processes on paper.

A business process platform can leverage BPM, but this is not a requirement (see Note 2). A business process platform does not require application developers to design end-to-end customer business processes, as in a development environment, because users can create a composite (or use a composite that a vendor has created).

One drawback of this approach is that with a BPM, enterprises need the ability to design their end-to-end customer business processes themselves, because BPM is a development environment. Unlike CRM or ERP platforms, there are few recommended process flows or industry-specific process templates for organizations to leverage. In Table 3, we summarize the pros and cons of selecting a custom BPM for end-to-end customer business processes.

Table 3. Pros and Cons for Using a Custom BPM Platform

Cons

Enterprises need the ability to design end-to-end customer business processes without the same degree of process templates needed for CRM and ERP.

Costs of achieving this could be high, because it is a remodeling of the enterprise application structure.

Pros

A build environment, where end-to-end business processes can be built in a composite or custom way.

Decoupling from a specific business application vendor’s CRM or ERP platform.

Provides more-agile business processes for the business.

Source: Gartner (March 2009)

Note 2

Business Process Platform

This approach enables enterprises to manage composite end-to-end customer business processes, which may be supported by a number of business applications in one common environment. Rule engines can automate these processes, enabling a high degree of consistency. At the same time, many organizations do not necessarily want to create their end-to-end business processes in just one vendor’s application, because it creates a high degree of dependence on a particular vendor. With a custom application designed in a BPM environment, the components for designing the end-to-end process enable a higher degree of decoupling from any specific ERP or CRM vendor.

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4.0 Determining the Suitability of a CrM, erP or BPM Platform Through Customer end-to-end ProcessesMost business applications aim for process consistency, which then creates conflicts with sales, marketing and customer service users. For some customer processes, such as onboarding, there are often many organizational groups mobilized and applications used to support the introduction of a new customer. Underpinning this is a high degree of organizational fragmentation around ownership of the end-to-end customer process, such as customer onboarding. Few organizations have implemented customer end-to-end business processes across the enterprise with an aligned organizational structure in place.

Although ERP plays a vital role in the organization, its involvement in a process such as customer onboarding can sometimes be limited, depending on the industry involved. Sometimes, enterprises refer to their back-office applications as ERP, although their actual ERP platform is used mostly for administrative functions. The extent of ERP usage and how it is referred to does vary by industry in many cases.

Nevertheless, customer onboarding is a good example of an end-to-end customer business process, because it provides a customer-focused view of how a system selection decision can be carried out. To understand how to segment the phases of an end-to-end customer business process, such as customer onboarding, it is useful to employ the customer buying life cycle (see Table 4 and Note 3).

Table 4. Customer Buying Life Cycle

Overview

Establishing need fulfillment. Creating an opportunity for a sale to take place.

Once customers establish a need or want, they seek information about the products or service. Customers are looking for contextually relevant answers.

Customers compare available choices, service and price configuration.

The purchase transaction process.

Following the purchase, the ongoing customer service and support processes.

Customer Buying/Onboarding Process

Need/want recognition

Information search

Evaluating product or service

Purchase

Postpurchase

Note 3

Customer Buying Process Life Cycle

The customer buying process life cycle is attributed to Philip Kotler, co-author with Kevin Lane Keller of “Marketing Management,” Prentice Hall. Gartner has extended this model to focus on the postpurchase phase. Adam Sarner, a research director at Gartner, presented “Social Networking and the Future of CRM” at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, in Orlando, Florida, during October 2008.

Source: Gartner (March 2009)

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The customer buying life cycle shows the different phases that an end-to-end customer business process spans, and how the process can be organized for further analysis. In telecommunications, for example, when a customer is onboarded, there are different process owners at different parts of the process and at different customer buying life cycle phases. In Table 5, we present details of how the customer onboarding process and related subphases take place across distinct platforms

based on a customer-focused view against the customer buying life cycle phases. We use this approach to determine the suitability of selecting an ERP or CRM platform.

In enrolling the customer as a new opportunity during customer onboarding, many applications are involved. ERP is largely being used only to track ongoing profit or loss contributions to the financial ledger accounts for the telecom unit (such as wireless, cable, land line or Internet/

Table 5. Example of Customer Onboarding Process in Telecom Scenario

Postpurchase Customer Service

Profit/loss contributions of various telecom services for customers Logistics support for provisioning of services or products Customer service application for ongoing customer life cycle management CRM feedback management system for surveys and satisfaction scoring by customers

Ongoing telecom service billing to customers

Network management applications to ensure availability of services

Source: Gartner (March 2009)

Purchaseevaluating Product or Service

information SearchNeed/Want recognition

Customer Buying Life Cycle Phase

Customer Process Subphase

Application Process Owner

ERP Platform Vice President, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Operations

CRM Platform Vice President, Customer Service/Sales/Marketing

Billing/Transaction Applications

Vice President, Billing/Transaction Services

Other Applications

Vice President, Technology/Network Operations

Customer Identification, Acquisition and Enrollment

Product and Service Enablement

Campaign marketing tool to identify customer segments for offers Customer master database with customer and prospects data

Customer self-service portal Knowledge management tool used for best practices on customer interaction by contact center agents Customer profile data setup in CRM system

Content management system for sales and product information

Dynamic products and pricing configurator Interactive voice recognition system for providing informational insight on different products and services Contact center agent desktop software to support customer interaction

Network diagnostic tool to confirm service availability

Procurement of goods or replenishment of products ordered Customer order e-configurator to help customer select packages E-commerce CRM application to support online orders Customer self-service tool for dynamic products and pricing Real-time decisioning tool for determining next best decision to take with customers. Telecom service and billing profile creation

Network provisioning tools to commence or enhance customer’s services

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DSL). There are more activities in the CRM platform and other application groups, which suggest that they would be likely considerations on where to define the customer end-to-end business processes.

We recommend using this form of process analysis to select which platform type to build customer processes. This approach also is helpful in isolating the underlying applications supporting the subprocesses of the end-to-end customer business process. This enables enterprises to see how many stages of a process are in specific application groups. In some cases, one subprocess may be minimal in overall importance; but, in other cases, a subprocess could be critical to the overall end-to-end business process. To mitigate against this, enterprises can use appropriate comparative weighting for each subprocess component to see which application type is the best to use as a platform for managing the end-to-end customer business process. Thus, enterprises can use the number of stages, and where needed, and a potential weighting of the subprocesses together as critical inputs for deciding which platform will best serve the end-to-end customer business process.

As a best practice for most service-centric customer business processes, enterprises should consider starting the design point of their end-to-end processes from their CRM platform, and integrate to other components and platforms as needed. This is because with service-centric (as opposed to product-centric) processes, most of the process points are in the CRM suite. Notwithstanding this, true end-to-end customer BPM will require integration across all major suites and applications, irrespective of which suite the organization selects for the customer-centric process functionality.

The most effective way to determine where organizations should design their end-to-end business processes is to consider different scenarios for customer processes. By using the customer buying life cycle to first frame an end-to-end customer business process (for example, customer onboarding), enterprises can highlight the subphases and then map which components of the process are taking place in CRM, ERP and other system platforms. Enterprises should undertake this type of analysis to determine the suitability of CRM or ERP platforms for their specific end-to-end customer business process needs.

Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00164834, Isher Kaila, 2 March 2009

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